The sound digs in and twists, like a spoon to the freezer-burned ice cream that is your brain. It’s not as noticeable in other situations – maybe the piano was your great grandmother’s and no one has tuned it since it was thrown into the basement, and its tinny keys might hurt your ears, but never as much as the sound of a piano being tuned. Whether your ears are blessed with perfect pitch or not, listening to the pitch wobble slightly above and below the note is enough to turn a quiet afternoon into a throbbing temple. The persistent beating of the finger on the keys along with the turning of the screws turns the once beautiful instrument, my baby, into something I dread to hear.
But it doesn’t stay that way. You thought it was fine before, just slightly below the pitch on your middle C and F sharp keys, but the awful twisting of the knobs and tightening and loosening of the strings has brought an even more beautiful sound into the air. In order to get to the promise land of a perfectly in tune piano, you have to go through the hell of the tuning. It could be a metaphor for life – change is hard, but the other side is clearer and sunnier once you get through the storm. One could say something similar to Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room”, as the piece changes drastically from the start to the beginning. It begins with spoken word, and goes through a transition to what could almost be described as music, the frequencies of the room. It may not be as beautiful as Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 2 No. 9, but the painful transition of underwater-like sounds brings it into a sound not far from music.
